The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Data centers that make use of standard equipment racks often will have equipment, for example file servers, which may be ordered and configured with different capabilities that affect the amount of power that each server will draw. As such, in many instances such components will have power supplies that are able to supply much more power than what may be needed. For example, three rack mountable servers may each be supplied with 1000 watt power supplies, but one may be equipped (e.g., graphic cards, memory cards, etc.) so that it only consumes 300 watts, the second may be configured so that it consumes only 500 watts, and the third may be configured to consume 900 watts. If these are the only components mounted in the rack, then one may conclude that a fair amount of excess power capacity has been provided at the rack. This is also known as power “overprovisioning,” and happens quite frequently in data centers. Overprovisioning represents an added cost to the operator of the facility. The excess power capacity may also result in a greater degree of cooling capacity needing to be provided to the rack as compared to what would be required if only that specific amount of power required, and perhaps a small amount of additional power as “headroom”, was supplied to the components of the rack. Still further, a powerful power supply present inside one rack mounted component may give rise to EMI concerns relative to adjacently mounted equipment. Such concerns may be obviated if the power supplies could all be located at one or more specific locations or areas of the rack. But with present rack mounted data center equipment each including its own power supply, this is not possible.
Still further, when equipment configuration changes need to be made to one or more existing rack mounted components that affect the power being drawn by the component(s), this can be somewhat inconvenient to the data center worker. For example, situations may arise where a configuration change is made to a given component, for example a server, to add one or more cards to the component that changes its power requirements. Increased power requirements may then necessitate changing the power supply in the server to accommodate the additional power required (assuming the power supply does not have sufficient capacity to handle the additional power draw). A rack system that essentially provides independent, custom configurable power supplies that directly power the various other rack mounted computing, storage, networking, etc. components in a given rack, would significantly simplify making equipment configuration changes to each rack, while allowing the user to deploy only that amount of power that is required by the new equipment configuration of the rack.
Finally, with equipment racks that accommodate individual rack mountable components that each have their own power supply, a substantial degree of wasted power capability may be present at each rack. So for example, if three rack mounted servers are each equipped with 1000 watt power supplies, but each one is configured such that it draws only 500 watts, then a total of 1.5 kw would be unused (i.e., “stranded” power capacity). This may be considerably more extra power capacity than what is needed. If this situation occurs in a large plurality of racks, for example dozens or hundreds of racks within a large data center, it will be appreciated that the collective stranded power capacity may represent a significant added cost to the data center operator.